


What Will You Gain When You Lose?

by BloodyAbattoir



Series: Manifest Destiny [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anorexia, Binge Eating Disorder, Depression, Drug Use, Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-23 17:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20344009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BloodyAbattoir/pseuds/BloodyAbattoir
Summary: Once you started losing weight, everything fell into place.





	What Will You Gain When You Lose?

You've finally hit a breaking point, surrounded by the wrappers and empty containers that marked your latest binge. You weren't always as large as you currently are. A mere three years ago, you were a slender sylph of a thing, attractive and ethereal. Then, life collapsed, and you filled the void with cheap, empty calories, stuffing your body to the point of pain and going beyond it, time and time again. You ballooned up, twenty plus kilos in three years, the majority of it gained in the past year. 

You mourn every aspect of your past existence, from your failed relationships to your flabby figure. Somehow, you've conflated the two, and the two chase each other around the inside of your head, until finally, they've become one and the same. You now have a fixation in your head, that the reason that everything fell apart was due to your size. After all, you reason with yourself, everyone loved you so much when you were just a hair underweight. Soon, you've developed a new fixation, your mind obsessing over a new concept.

If you became thinner, lighter than your previous weight, then maybe this nightmare would be over. If you became small enough, everything would be right again.

Double digits, you think to yourself, lower than your lowest weight, a hundred and five pounds when you were fifteen and too depressed to bother eating. Nevermind that you were several inches taller than then. Nevermind that your body had changed, your bones grown into the frame of a mature adult woman, no longer a scrawny teenage girl. 

You set your mind to it, and that's what you'd do, you think. 

And so it starts. You log back into your old account on a proana website. All of the old usernames and icons you'd grown used to seeing have gone, replaced by new faces, new names. It doesn't matter. The energy is close enough that it'll trigger you into a full relapse. Or so you think. 

The fact of the matter is, you were never truly anorexic, not in the typical sense. Your prior weight loss was driven by depression, not a desire to be smaller. But you'd joined the website anyway when you were in highschool, feeling a fake every step of the way, if only to have a website where you were anonymous, no real names or faces to connect the words you scream into the void with your legal identity, a website where harming yourself was met with condolences and tips to conceal it, tips to minimize the lasting damage, not threats of sectioning. 

Now, it was enough to trigger you again. You create a new thread, screaming into the website that you'd abandoned two years ago, when you became too depressed to function, let alone interact with others. It's quickly met with several followers, and you chronicle your daily struggles, your intakes and your burns. Your intakes shrink, finally in the range of being acceptable for an adult, no longer enough to feed a small family. Most of the time, that is. You take up fasting, days at a time, only to fail and binge on everything in sight two days later, too much of a failure to even purge more than a few mouthfuls of your gluttony. 

As the numbers on the scale creep up, your will to live plummets. 

Finally, you snap. You were never a fan of medications to begin with, always seeing them as something that only the ill took. After all, you weren't ill, now were you? Oh yes, you weren't ill, if you were taking anti-depressants, that must mean you were crazy! So went the logic your family subscribed by throughout the years, and you couldn't help but internalize it all. No sir, you didn't need any crazy pills. 

Until now. 

You scour the proana websites, over and over, looking for magic solution to your weight gain. At this point, you'd literally sell your soul to Satan if you could, if only for a quick fix. The quick fix itself comes in the form of a thread, innocuous and forgotten from several years prior. In and of itself, it was harmless, simply asking the members of the forum about their medications, and any side effects that they suffered from. Two in particular caught your eye.

The first, and more promising of the two of them was prescribed for ADHD, the chemical structure so similar to meth that it was a shock that it was still legal. While you had no documented history of ADHD and would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any physician to prescribe it to you, you did have a long-ranging history of depression, making you a perfect candidate for the second drug, an anti-depressant that had such a strong appetite-suppressing side effect, it was mostly prescribed to those who were already overweight. 

You hop on the scale, and waited for the numbers to stop flashing around. It was worse than you thought. You hop off, and stare at yourself in the mirror. You carried it reasonably well, but your BMI was just a hair away from 30, objectively overweight, and a large meal or two away from obesity. Yes, this would do quite nicely. But how to convince a psychiatrist to disregard your history, prescribe you whatever you asked for? You type out another thread on your forum, but the answer hits you like a ton of brick. 

You were in a large city, and shady clinics abounded. They were legal, if only just so, and more importantly, they were more concerned with turning a profit than anything else. 

You find yourself downtown, standing outside a clinic that boldly advertised medical marijuana cards. This must be the place. It's a large office building, but as soon as you walk in the foyer, you can tell that at least half of the building is abandoned. There is no directory. You step into the elevator, questioning if it's too late to bolt. Your desire for a quick fix outweighs your anxiety, and you quickly jab the button for the second floor. 

Your anxiety is so bad, you're afraid you'll puke or piss yourself or pass out, or gods forbid, some combination thereof, before you see a doctor. 

When the elevator doors open, you realize that your fears were unfounded. The floor is deserted aside from the 'medical clinic', staffed by a total of one doctor and two receptionists. They have you sign a bunch of forms, but the moment you hand the clipboard back, you realize that they were likely just for show, a cover your ass sort of thing. You leave multiple lines blank. They say nothing. You don't bring your past medical records, and they don't ask. It's perfect. 

You end up in a room with a man that reminds you of a rounded mouse on crack with a verbal tick. He asks you a half-dozen questions, takes your blood pressure. You mention your struggles, and that you'd taken the drug you were seeking before, with good effects. You hadn't. He simply asks you if you want to continue taking it, seven years after you'd last seen a psychologist. You nod, and just like that, you've been given a prescription and turned loose into the world. 

You practically skip back to the car, the slip of paper clutched in your hand like the bible. 

Two days later finds you taking the first of the pills. Within an hour, you start to feel high, almost like cocaine, without the awful burning nostrils. The feeling only increases, and your energy abounds. Your appetite is minimal, more of a mental thing than a physical demand for food. The cravings start to disappear, the desperation disappearing. Your calories drop, and as your energy rises, you shed the pounds like a thick winter coat as spring wears on. By the time that you go back for a refill, you've dropped ten pounds, and gained a newfound confidence. 

You say the pills work wonders for you, but say nothing of the mania. The 'doctor' smiles and nods,happy that you've found something that works for you, and you walk off with another prescription, this time, for a ninety day supply of pills. By now, food is a rare treat. You have no need for it, no desire. The pounds fly away, and bones are revealed, delicate and protruding all over your frame. You're quickly approaching your goal of being in the double digits.

Your weight continues to drop, and soon, you are tossing your fat clothes into a garbage sack, off to the charity shops with them. You've just finished dropping them off, little more than a skeleton with skin and yet so far still to go before you're at a state of perfection, when your phone goes off. It's your ex, the first you've heard from him in almost six months. He's back in town for Thanksgiving, and his plans fell through. More importantly, he wanted to know if you were free this weekend. 

You cackle with manic glee as you type out a response. Yes, yes, YES! You were free, only because it was him. Two days later sees you tearing through your closet in search of something to wear. You didn't want to look like slob, but at the same time, you didn't want to be too flirtatious. After all, it'd been nearly three years since you were on such good terms. Finally, you settle, a plain black dress and the plaid jacket you'd bought but never wore more than once or twice at most. Tights to hide the burgeoning number of scars that crisscrossed your legs. 

You're checking the bright scarlet lipstick that you'd applied in the mirror for the millionth time when your phone went off again. He was here. Outside your house. You grab your purse, your phone, your keys, and float out the door. His mothers car is parked on the street, and he is standing in front of your door. He cracks a smile as he sees you, smaller than even the times when you dated, eyes raking over your slender figure, taking in your hipbones that show through the fabric of your dress, your tights, the gap between your leg, the way your collarbones threatened to cut through the skin at the base of your throat. 

You smile back as he sweeps you into a hug, huge and engulfing, everything you'd missed, praising how good you looked. He'd never seen you at your highest weight, and you thanked every god in existence, and perhaps a few that no longer existed, never did, for that fact. 

When finally the two of you part, it is too soon, and yet, an eternity later. Your head is swimming, whether from the lack of nutrition or the smell of his cologne, intoxicating as ever, you cannot tell. 

He ushers you to the car, opening the passenger door for you. It still gets stuck and makes an odd noise if you open it too far, the panel dented in just enough to be a nuisance, not enough to warrant a replacement or repair. A flash of regret crosses his face as he has to depart from you, for only a moment, before he is in the drivers seat, and the car is on the road again. 

The entire drive, his hand is on your thigh, almost absent-minded, just like old times, as if nothing had ever changed between you. You can't help but notice how much less of your thighs there are. His hand could easily wrap around one, bambi legs and knobbly knees all that was left of the massive ripples of flesh that graced the cottage cheese sacks that passed for your legs not three months before. 

You say nothing, basking in the affection while it lasted, silently willing him to leave his hand where it was, desperately trying to imprint every moment of this in your mind, every stroke of his fingers and idle question, every laugh. It was all you'd wanted since the two of you split, and here, you had it but for a moment. 

It turns out that it was indeed a date, of sorts, a horror movie and sushi at that little restaurant that he'd always taken you out to for special occasions. You note the way that his arm wraps around you quasi-casually, the way he offers his jacket to you, pulls out your chair. You nearly squeal with joy as you feel his hands brush against your back casually as you walk, as if he's afraid to touch you, featherlight and brief, the way that you'd touch something delicate and fragile. 

Finally at the end of the night, he's dropping you home, your heart both singing and on the verge of heartbreak. Certainly you were an indiscretion, this entire night nothing more than a mistake, a desperate bid to fill a void left in his itinerary. Instead, he walks you to your door, and stops you with his hand on your wrist. You can see the gears turning in his mind as you wait, until finally, he said that he had a good time, and that he was happy to see you again. 

There are more words left unsaid, essays and novels that will never pass his lips, but the hug that he gives you before you enter your home says it for you. You swear that you can almost feel him press a single kiss into your hair, so softly that if you weren't expecting it, you might've missed it entirely. 

You wait until you're in your room, clothing shed and crawling into your pajamas, to burst out crying, sobs so painful they make your ribs and stomach ache. It was a perfect night, and to think that if you hadn't fucked up everything you had in the past, these nights could've been a regular occurrence, not a freak incident. You're crying so hard that you nearly miss it as your phone goes off again. 

You sniffle and stare at the screen with blurry eyes. It's him. He's texting you to let you know that he got home safely. He had a great time with you. You should go out like that again with him. It's a flicker of hope, until you notice the dots that indicate that he's still typing. Another message comes through. He's wondering what could've been. What would have happened if things between you hadn't exploded. What would things between the two of you look like now, in a time when you were both older, more mature. He wanted to know what your thoughts were on it. 

The questions were fully loaded, and yet, they hadn't caught you off guard. These were the thoughts that chased each other around your head at night, filled your mind to the brink with doubt, what-ifs and could've beens. 

You type out your response, and hold your breath as you hit send. 

The moments between when he reads the message and when he finally starts typing again is an eternity, in which every heartbeat takes a full century, and you feel faint and nauseous all at once. This was it. He was going to crush your heart all over again. 

When you finally peep at your phone screen again, it's the exact opposite of what you'd expected, what you'd feared. Your wildest fantasies had come to life, and were playing out on the LED screen clasped in your clammy grasp. A single question, the weight of the world on your shoulders.

_ **Do you want to try things between us again?** _


End file.
